Will a mango by any other name taste as sweet?

The ‘Kuttiattoor mango,’ is a rare variety of delicious, sweet-smelling mangoes grown mostly in Kuttiattoor village of Kerala’s Kannur district. The mango, however, has a caste ‘identity,’ too. Locals call it the ‘Nambiar mango’; to the outsiders, though, it is the Kuttiattoor mango. The Nambiar caste, whose members once used to be landlords in North Kerala, has a sizeable presence in Kuttiattoor.

Legend has it that the mango got its name from a Nambiar farmer who used to carry mangoes to the marketplace in nearby Irikkoor. The Maappila (Muslim) merchants started referring to this delicious mango as the Nambiar mango.

Locals are proud of the mango as the world outside identifies them with it. Almost every household in the village has at least one mango tree growing in their backyard. “It needs no special care, no fertilizers and no pesticides, and hence the fruit is organic and poison-free,” says B. Krishnan, secretary of the Kuttiattoor Mango Growers Association.

The tree grows tall and the branches are spread out, that is a problem because harvesting is hard. And, the tree blooms once in two years, but it’s a bountiful crop. There are roughly 200 hectares of mango groves producing around 8,000 tonnes of fruit in the village each year, but mango cultivation is not commercial yet.

A couple of years ago, the gram panchayat decided that the mango deserved better. How about a Geographical Indication tag so that the fame of the fibre-rich, thin-skinned, nutritious fruit would get a global identity? Quick steps were taken towards the journey to secure the GI tag. The help of the Indian Institute of Horticultural Research was sought.

Then caste raised its head: the Nambiar Maha Sabha demanded that the GI name be ‘Nambiar mango’ and not ‘Kuttiattoor mango.’ The Maha Sabha, formed just two years back, saw an opportunity in this to highlight the caste’s heritage. It served a legal notice on the gram panchayat. “The mango has for long been called locally by our caste’s name,” Rajesh Nambiar, chairman of the Maha Sabha, told BusinessLine . “So, why shouldn’t they retain the name?” Rajesh, who runs an IT firm, says that being a forward caste, the Nambiars had not received any special benefits from the government. Retaining the mango’s name would be a small favour to the caste.

But, the president of the CPI (M)-governed Kuttiattoor gram panchayat, C Sujatha, disagrees. “The GI tag is to identify a place to be the origin of a product, and not to glorify a caste,” she says. “We will stick to the geographic name.”

Krishnan pointed out that it was the soil quality of Kuttiattoor that gave the mango its special flavour, taste and colour. Though the mango was cultivated in some nearby villages too, the taste was far inferior, he said, underscoring his argument favouring ‘Kuttiattoor.’